The surge took the electronics, not the disk. Repairing the board and carrying over its one-of-a-kind ROM got it spinning again.
A Woking design studio lost their 2 TB WD Blue to a thunderstorm — a surge came down the mains and the drive went utterly dead, no spin, no clicks, no sign of life at all. Counter-intuitively, dead silence is often the best news you can get in a case like this, because it usually means the circuitry absorbed the blow and shielded the moving parts behind it. The board is, after all, first in line when a spike arrives down the power lead.
Inspecting the printed circuit board showed exactly that: a protection component on it had blown itself out to shunt the surge away from everything downstream, sparing the motor and the heads. So the drive underneath was healthy — the problem was purely getting power flowing into it again. On a current-generation Western Digital, though, that’s not a matter of simply screwing on a spare board.
Each modern WD board carries a little calibration chip whose contents are matched to that one specific drive; drop in a replacement board without carrying that chip over and the drive won’t start correctly, or it’ll misread its own surfaces. So we fixed the damaged board and moved the drive’s original chip across to it, marrying the electronics back to the mechanics they belonged with. It spun up on the first attempt, and we imaged it on the PC3000.
The image came away without a single bad sector, and the file system appeared precisely as it had been before the storm. We checked that the project files and design assets opened as they should, then handed everything back on a new drive.
The studio’s entire archive was restored four working days after the lightning. Two things it drives home: put anything important behind surge protection, and never assume a stone-dead drive is a lost cause — far more often than not the data is completely fine, trapped behind nothing worse than a fried board.
PC3000 — board repaired, calibration chip transferred, then imaged on our bench. The drive is copied first and the original is never written to.
Send us your device for a free diagnostic, and tell us a little about what happened — an engineer will review it and confirm your exact quote in writing before any work begins.
Getting your data back begins with getting the device to us. Pack it up safely, pop your contact details inside, and send it over — once we’ve run the free diagnostic, we’ll confirm your exact price in writing before any work starts.
Posting it? A tracked, insured service is what we’d recommend. Rather drop it in? You’re welcome Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm — just package the device up as above first.
Want a bit more detail first? Fill in the form with more about your issue and an engineer will review it and send you a custom quote.
We’ll be in touch shortly. For anything urgent, call 01483 901310.
Usually not. A completely silent drive after a surge is typically a blown board sitting over healthy mechanics, and the data is often entirely intact. We repair the board — carrying the drive’s calibration chip across where needed — then image it on the PC3000.
From £300 plus VAT, the majority of jobs no fix, no fee, with a fixed written quote before any work.
It seldom works on modern drives — the board holds calibration data specific to that exact drive, so a donor board without the original chip moved over usually won’t spin up right, or misreads the platters. It needs the proper tools.
Start with an instant online quote, or call and talk it through with us first. You'll have a clear, fixed price before any work begins.